A thousand permanent and temporary workers at one of the biggest businesses in Devon can breathe a sigh of relief, a union official has revealed.

Staff were understandably nervous after an investigation allegedly revealed a string of health and safety breaches at the 2 Sisters chicken processing plant in West Bromwich.

An undercover reporter working at the company's West Midlands site claimed to witness workers tampering with slaughter dates and mixing meat of different ages.

Source codes on crates of meat were also changed, the investigation by ITV News and The Guardian claimed.

The food group yesterday admitted it had found “other areas of concern”, centred on food hygiene standards, at its chicken processing plant, which was shut down at the weekend.

Major retailers including Tesco, Aldi, Lidl and M&S have suspended orders of chicken from the firm and this week butchers' chain Lloyd Maunder, which has 14 shops in Devon and a branch in Cornwall, moved to distance itself from the supplier.

(Image: Google)

Amid concern that the fall-out from the scandal could be felt in Devon, the Unite union, which has around 500 members at Willand, met with the management team yesterday.

Heathcliffe Pettifer, regional organiser for the South West at Unite, said he had been reassured that production would continue as usual.

"I spoke to the production manager and plant manager who said the plant would not really be affected by what's been going on up north - it is business as usual in Willand," he added.

"It's good news for all our hard-working members who are committed to producing food to a high quality - long may that continue.

"We have a big membership there and good relationship with what is generally speaking a good employer. They have got very good quality standards, are regularly tested and audited and have always passed with flying colours."

2SFG is owned by Ranjit Singh Boparan and his wife, Baljinder Kaur Boparan, and the chicken operations – which include 12 sites in the UK.

It is part of a sprawling £3bn food empire that separately includes the turkey producer Bernard Matthews, the restaurant chains Harry Ramsden, FishWorks and Giraffe, which has a branch in Exeter's Princesshay.

Its meat processing plant at Willand, near Cullompton, which slaughters and processes around one million birds every week for Britain's supermarkets, has not been implicated in the story.

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Local MP for Tiverton & Honiton, Neil Parish, has called for an inspection of the site but the Food Standards Agency has said this will not happen unless they are alerted to evidence of any breaches of regulations, which has not happened.

In a conference call with investors on Tuesday, company executives said that the closure would cost the company up to £500,000 a week, teh Guardian has reported.

The firm has said it will be using the incident as a “wake-up call” and would be retraining staff across its business, it added.

Martyn Fletcher, chief operating officer at 2 Sisters, said: “We do not believe that we have got any major compliance issues in our organisation. It’s isolated to this particular video footage and we have, in investigating the site, found some other areas of concern at that site.

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2 Sisters scandal

“We will be using the incident as a wake-up call and will be rolling out those learnings and retraining [staff] right across the estate.”

The food group said the problems related to food hygiene rather than regulatory breaches at the factory.

In Devon, confusion among some consumers prompted the Lloyd Maunder chain to issue a statement making it clear there is no link to 2SFG, which is the UK’s second largest food company by turnover and claims to process around 6 million chickens every week.

Andrew Maunder, the fourth generation of the family to run Lloyd Maunder, told DevonLive.com there had been comments online wrongly suggesting the chain was part of the food giant.

The former Exeter rugby club captain and scrum-half, whose son Jack plays for the Chiefs, parted company with the abattoir business in 2013.

"We have had people on Facebook thinking Lloyd Maunder butchers are part of the abattoir business that [2SFG] bought," he added.

In a statement Lloyd Maunder added: "We would like to clarify that Lloyd Maunder Butchers is not and never has been owned by the 2 Sisters Food Group.

"The company is privately owned by Andrew Maunder. Andrew is the fourth generation of his family to own the company that was established in 1898.

"We would also like to point out that none of the chicken sold in our shops is, or ever has been, supplied by the 2 Sisters Food Group."